Posted
by
CowboyNeal
on Saturday July 12, 2003 @05:52PM
from the dollar-stretching dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Here is an article on NewsForge regarding evangelizing OSS in the Caribbean. I'm wondering what others think of the impact efforts like this may have on software development jobs in the US. Is IT still a viable field to get into and if so will it last?"

"The two-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago (TT) relies on imports for almost everything except beer, rum, some locally-grown farm products, and oil -- and oil is its major cash export. That oil is expected to last, at most, another 35 years. After that, how is TT going to pay foreign companies for software licenses?"

My family is from T&T (although I was born in Canada) so let me clarify a few things:

It's more than 2 islands. There are a lot of little islands too but the 2 main ones are Trinidad

T&T has 2 major exports, not one: Oil and drugs. Seriously. The US suppliers take their yhats down from Florida and sail into Tobago beaches. This is where they load up on that which was produced in South America, particularly Colombia. The other main industry is tourism which is obviously not a cash export.
Not sure that staging drugs from South America through Tobago rates as an 'export' strictly speaking. Drugs are staged through the Bahamas, St.Vincent and the Grenadines etc, so nothing unusual th

"Is this true? True, the standard of living for many people is 'lower' than in North America or Europe, but the quality of life could be said to be higher in some cases. I remember the first time I went to Tobago, (to meet my future in-laws). We came from Barbados having stopped there for a week on the way out from England. Being in Tobago after being in Barbados was a shock, true enough. The way of life, the lack of creature comforts, no big department stores etc. However, after a few days, I found I wasn't missing them. Life was laid back, simple and cool."

You'd be surprised how it has changed. It is getting a lot more touristic, although I think there are still no big department stores or strips with McDonalds, KFC, etc.

But I do agree with the part about being laid back, simple and cool. I think the smaller the island is, the further back into the 'past' you go with regards to how relaxed and friendly it is.

"Anyway, enough already. You forget to mention the racial differences and the break down of wealth between the different racial groups. You also forget to mention the TT Government monopoly on oil distribution and (AFAIK) production. The corruption etc. I personally think Tobago would be better off without Trinidad."

True enough. Because I didn't grow up in TT, such things are not so apparent to me, but I am well aware of the struggles between the Afrian versus Indian populations and the stigmas that exist even today.

The OSS is repeating the tired old slogan that anything involving money is evil, but the truth of the matter is that money is what makes a higher standard of living possible."

I have never seen any Open Source document claim that money is evil. In fact, the notion that Open Source has something to do with Communism, Socialism, or any other form of economic theory is a leap of reason no less mystifying to me than Cantor's dealings with infinity (as discussed on your web page).

I happen to be a proponent of capitalism. The two deadliest things for capitalism are excessive government control of the flow of goods and services and excessive control of that flow by a few arbitrarily large businesses. having Standard oil control the flow of all oil in the United States was not good for capitalism, nor is it good to have one company corner the market on operating system and office automation software. That is particularly true (as the article points out) when that results in the creation of numerous closed standard formats for data.

The money that should be spent on computers is for R&D in new technologies, including software. That R&D on the software side is happening at (a few) universities here, within companies using Open Source, and to a large extent in Europe. For the most part Microsoft is milking a cash cow and trying to figure out how to keep it giving milk. Examples of research on NEW technologies which you could at one time find at research.Microsoft.com seem to have been abandoned for the most part.

AMD and the PowerPC give Intel enough competition to keep things healthy as far as hardware goes. Between the two monopolies, Intel and Microsoft I have a lot more respect for Intel, even though I wish competition were hotter sooner.

Finally, having one company dominate software, and another company dominate hardware is not in the long term best interest of this country. As the article accurately states, Open Source represents not only an opportunity for poorer countries to catch up technologically without the need for large sums of money, but it will also result in the education of substantial numbers of their population in the computer sciences. Today we turn people out of grad schools with computer science degrees who think that installing Windows and compiling a C program is the pinnacle of their university experience. We have dumbed-down our curriculums drastically thanks to Microsoft and Windows and we are going to get (actually it is happening now) the crap kicked out of us by countries that did not become so obsessed with a single operating system.

We will deserve it too. I just hope there are enough people here who will wake up so that we can get back in the race before WE become the third world nation of computing.

Hey man,....I really like where you are coming from, but your site, "Second Life" does not support OSS software.

I'm running RH8.0, fully patched with XD2, Mozilla and the full boat....why can't I play too? Your site did not specify Linux as an acceptable OS to play with. Supporting the "network effect" of Windows only serves to keep MS in power....could you do the same thing with Java, Flash or something generic?

No slam, just a gentle propt that you should really support OSS too by making your site avai

It's not *my* site, I'm just a user there. They plan support for both Linux and OS X later this year. The servers for the system run Linux already (of course!). The way this systems works, MOST of the work is done on the server side and your PC is more like a TV set viewport into the world. So, theory is that the various client parts will be easy to convert. I've talked to several of the developers there and they are all really into Linux and Open Source in general. So I have high hopes for this.

Interesting. What exactly is "Second Life"? I was clicking around the site, looking at screenshots etc., but I'm on a modem here and it's abysmally slow... From the description it sounds like it's trying to be like the online world in "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson(and other similar virtual worlds of course). It looks interesting, but often these things are glorified chat rooms with avatars.

"Open Source says what I develop belongs to the greater community. I have no problems with open source, but it is communism."

There is still a big difference between open source and communism. With communism you have no choice; anything you build belongs to the community whether you like it or not, unless you get their explicit permission to keep it for yourself. With open source, it is the other way around, and you aren't forced by law to release anything you create under an open source license.

But ok I will expand amplify and otherwise elaborate. If you can't pay for office your'e not going to be able to pay for programmers to give away the code to the project when its done. I will go further expand, amplify, broaden, elaborate and increase the level of discourse to say, That if you can't afford the office suite you need now, you can't very well pay programmers to develop a new one so you can give it away in 2 to 3 years from now.

The topic is about developing open source. If I am a manager in enterprise X in country Y and I have a requirement for software Z NOW!!!, in general it is impossible to say well we will get it done 3 years from now.

Using Open source, and Developing open source are 2 different things. If you want something customized to meet your immediate needs you will either have to hope someone is working on it and will get it done or you have to PAY!!!. Paying will be more expensive.

That was exactly my point. OSS is not going to be a savior. Trying to develop your own software isn't neccesesarily going to save anyones economy and in some cases could do serious damange. And in response to the topic question, No its not going to have much effect on the overall I.T. market unless you had a lot of sales to people that can't afford to buy your product.

FOSS does make it easier, since there is no initial cost in many cases.

Really ? There is no initial cost ? This means you have a reservoir of people trained in using the particular OSS app in question?? Oh and lets not forget making certain you have a support base that can and will help you to make things work. No initial cost, you should market for microsoft.

Decreases the digital divide ? What did you do swallow Al Gore's campaign briefing books ? If you can't afford a computer OSS isnt going to decre

Do I agree that free software can be helpfull for impoverished countries gaining entry into the information age. Is sunlight usefull in growing crops ? Do beaches help a tourism industry ? Are 2 piece bikinis beter than MooMoos ? Yes, is the question related to the prior topic ? NO.

Software decisions should not be made on the basis of ideaology, but on technological merits and economic realities.

Heres the counter question If buying propietary software allows the more rapid exploitation of economic oppor

Simple. You pay the people WITHIN the country to do work on the software within the country - so the money stays WITHIN the country. Millionaires or not.
As far as 'ideology or economic advancement' question - why do you think that they must be mutually exclusive?

If you have lost business because you decided to fund internal solutions, because there is a must develop locally you haven't kept money in the country. As a matter of fact you may very well have cost the company/enterprise/country more money.

I just looked at your web page http://www.knowprose.com you are apparently deeply commited to your agenda for a personal stake in the matter. I doubt all the facts in the world would cause you to differ one iota from that agenda. I must say though this has been a very annoying TROLL

The commercial, and particularly the retail, software industry is in big trouble from open source software. As software becomes a commodity, producing it will become less and less valuable to employers. Oddly, it still costs lots of money to create professional, polished consumer software, but the usually weak open source imitations are "good enough" for most people, or will be fairly soon. The real question is what happens when companies stop doing the basic research and innovation that open source deve

Operating systems should be free and open. Software should not. This is honest dissent, not a troll so moderators need to find someone else to mod down.

Having Windows controlled by Microsoft instead of the public allows them to wrestle companies to their knees. On the other side, the open source movement has as many innovative ideas as Microsoft which is damn near zero. By creating free software, the open source movement kicks third party companies in the kidneys while Microsoft is efficiently pushing them down already.

If Microsoft opened the source to Windows (perhaps 98) tomorrow, Linux would die a quick death or revert back to being a tool of hobbyists.

In fact, that might be the ultimate weapon in any potential trade war with Europe.;)

If Microsoft opened the source to Windows (perhaps 98) tomorrow, Linux would die a quick death or revert back to being a tool of hobbyists.

No, IMO, we'd just have a near perfect wine in about a year... and Linux use would skyrocket. Be honest, have you ever used anything but windows for more than a day? Really? That kind of comment makes me think not.

Re your software point... wtf? You want to ban people making open source applications? How much sense does that make? Law should not there to sustain any

This sounds like an MS baiter to me.....open source solutions are as good as the users want them to be....if you don't like something, fix it yourself or pay an opensource programmer to fix it for you.....the real question boils down to "how much is that bug really bugging you?"...Even MS products are released with an "acceptable number of bugs"....let's not get hung up on perfection when simply getting the job done is more important.

Here's my take on the "Software Ecosystem" as Bill likes to call it......people will forever onward need to get custom stuff done on computers...it's a fact. Not every project can be mass produced for the world and sold to billions of people for INSANE profit levels. I believe that most computer work is custom stuff, a little glue here, adapter there, specialized GUI for operators....this is where most of the rubber meets the road...it will always be there.

OSS equalizes the playing field for people/companies that want to realize all of the profits themselves. No MS tax, no tax to others, simply your brain and as much as you can produce. OSS is also good for business because they own the software that they've paid to be created...no extra tax in the future for them either, no update charge, no extra fees to keep current on MS Exchange Server, Backoffice server or whatnot....they write spec's for something, it's produced, they pay once and own the source...if they need maintaince, it's easily purchased from a competitive field of qualified professionals.....it's good business.

I've got no problem with people "buying" a solution either, that's part of the capitalist system. Define what you are good at, find a market niche and purchase the rest from people that are good at their respective areas.

It's the tax created by MS's "network effect" that has lots of people chafing...the idea that somehow I MUST send a good percentage of my profits elsewhere....it's MS's "Toll Booth" philosophy that's gonna cause them trouble....people don't like paying tolls, and they usualy find ways to either "slug" the meters or sneak around....In this case, they build their own seperate "Information superhighway"....OSS

OSS simply levels the playing field for programmers and buyers....we've all (people who use OSS) come to the conclusion that sharing a free OS, even with it's bugs (open to interpretation, I have not found any) is better than paying the increasingly draconian "Windows Tax" EVERY time you turn around. Pay for this, pay for that, pay to get inspected, pay when the inspectors kick in your door, coming to check your licenses. MS has turned their OS into a shakedown at every level.

Most disingenous was Bill G's comment about OSS keeping countries poor and being fine if you want your country to stay backward and agricultural....bullsh*%....it gives them a "leg up" on the competition, not a deficit. This put's the competition strictly on brain power rather than lawyer power.

Time's gonna come when everyone is gonna have to pick which side of the revolution they want to be on....I've already done that because I see that MS can't win this fight...there's no company to buy, there's nobody to really sue (yeah, SCO fud, but they are going home in a wheelbarrow)...This can't be stopped primarily because it's really good for business and programmers alike.....it's only bad for the "Toll-booth operators" like MS.....

The company I work for is a small.com -- yes, we're profitable:), probably because we actually have a viable business model... Most of our servers are really cheap Intel boxes, and we have some very inexpensive server-grade Intel boxes for our most critical servers. The savings just from not paying the MS "tax" for server software is nearly half our yearly IT budget(minus salaries). It's been years since we've bought new servers; our last hardware purchase was several gigs of ram for under $500, and th

IANAEconomist, but I doubt that any of the US economy is going to last.

Forget long-term sustainablity issues, and just notice the increasing flood of companies moving manufacturing offshore to cut their costs. Certainly a smart move if all else were equal, but as more and more companies do it there's going to be less and less money to go around for the American worker, and as the total worker income drops the total consumer spending will drop as well.

Please. I hear this same argument all of the time. Although we have challenges to overcome in the next few years, to bet that US economy will not continue to be the world wide leader for the concievable future is insane.

The US started the IT craze. The IT industry is being increasingly taken over by countries outside of the US. The US started the biotech craze. The biotech industry, is and will continue, to be increasingly non-US based. The US is starting the nanotech craze right now. Eventually co

You've hinted at something I wanted to mention, so I'll reply to your post. This is primarily opinion, but I'm reasonably confident that fact would back it up if I bothered to do any research.

For a long time (at least back to 1901, if not much farther), the main export of the US hasn't been cars, refrigerators, microwaves, drugs, televisions, computers, weapons or indeed anything physical. The primary export has been new creations that no one has ever done before. The product that the US will primarily

The point isn't whether the US will still lead world markets, the point is how many people in the US will be benefiting from this position.The US has between 30 and 40 million people living in poverty, that's a whole 3rd world country within the US borders. The US is the only G7 country without public health care. The top 1% in the US has more wealth than the bottom 95%. And with continued Reaganomics (like Bush's tax cut for the top 5%) this disparity will only continue to grow.I don't know about you, but

That's a good thing - as wealth flows out of the US where it has been hoarded in recent years it will flow into poor countries. This will raise the standard of living there, whilst the standard of living in the US drops - evenutally they should meet somewhere in the middle, bar fluctuations.

It won't quite work like that (because it's not a perfect capitalist market) but it's close. Look at the standard of living rises that have occured in the now-maturing tiger economies and even China - the next big wave

Your argument assumes that there is only a finite amount of wealth in the world, and that if we do not concentrate it here, it will go somewhere else and leave us impoverished. In reality, wealth is generated according to human production. If we (meaning the nation, or even the human race as a whole) produce more, we are more wealthy! Even if we have less 'money', which is just paper anyway, but more things we like, we are better off. Therefore not at all outsourcing is bad, as it allows us to enjoy the

Now, having said all this, I think you are quite right that the bottom could still fall out of the U.S economy, quite possibly due to consumer spending. I am inclined to think the levels of household debt are alarming here. Consumers do not have much more to spend.

So your "correct" solution leaves the bottom falling out of the US economy?

Just how do you define "correct"? You a Libertarian cultist or something? (I'm joking.)

Basic international economics. Without barriers, prices eventually reach an equilibrium. Country A has many peaches, so peaches are cheap. Country B does not have some many peaches, so peaches are not so cheap. The countries trade, Country A peach farmers win and country B farmer lose. Country A consumers win, while country B consumers most pay a bit higher price due to the increase in demand. However, the OVERALL QUANTITY OF CONSUMPTION INCREASES. That means the economy wins as a whole.

You need to sell an awful lot of trinkets to cruise ship passengers to buy a proprietary office suite.

Hopefully the OSS revolution will help rid the world of the indignity caused by cruise ships filled with passengers buying trinkets.

As for the question of IT jobs. The software developing jobs will gradually fade into memory, but there is still a need for having IT skills, and there will continue to be jobs for network admins, data entry and report writers, etc.

The main goal of OSS is simply to end the idea of software development as a business. Software development is only one piece of the pie.

But back to third world evangelizing. Most US software companies have found out that they cannot afford serious OSS development. When the flaws of the revolution become apparent, it is natural to move to the third world.

The question is whether or not the natives have caught on to the double edge sword. Preaching free software and creating a world where software is only taken and not traded, then the third world nimrods who fall for the propaganda will find their software development skills worth less than the local trinket makers.

None of the natives are buying
any second hand American Dreams
Jimmy Buffet

In someways I see this little Stalin-wannabe iconoclast preaching in the third world as the ultimate act of contempt. Giving your work away for free doesn't work in the first world. So you preach to the peasantry of the glories of the revolution to the third world.

It is a fun example of history repeating itself. The fearless leader preaches the glories of revolution to the peasantry knowing full well that the dictatorship of the prolitariat intends to pave the roads of their paradise with the blood of their followers.

The main goal of OSS is simply to end the idea of software development as a business.

Where'd you get that one from? Free software is not putting anyone out of business. If anything, it encourages innovation by commercial developers. If you haven't noticed, commercial software makers have been forced to make increasingly better software in order to stay competitive (just compare Win2K and Win98). That is good for the industry. As long as the industry stays innovative, nothing is going to move to the

The fact that the Microsoft monopoly has been bad for the industry does not make OSS by default good.

I actually agree with most of the points about the advancement of knowledge and innovation that come equipped with OSS. I agree with the ability to see in the code, etc., etc., etc..

But there needs to be an economic reward for the developers. What we need is something different from this world of mega monopolies and free software revolution against the machine. We need to figure out how to create a stru

Strange. You seem to have reversed half your viewpoints since the parent post -- in which you stated (in essense) that OSS was an evil communist plot to rob everyone of the ability to make a living. OK, I'll bite. I'm bored so what the hey. Maybe you aren't a troll afterall.

But there needs to be an economic reward for the developers. What we need is something different from this world of mega monopolies and free software revolution against the machine. We need to figure out how to create a structure wh

There has to be an economic reward for the hard work it takes to become a great software developing center.

There is. You:a) get nice software that everyone can use and boosts the demand for computers (and thus other, commercial software)b) get a group of experienced software developers that know how to write software

You realize that some small company in Trinidad can't compete with the likes of Microsoft? You can't be a small fish in a pond dominated by sharks, you know.

The main goal of OSS is simply to end the idea of software development as a business. Software development is only one piece of the pie. But back to third world evangelizing. Most US software companies have found out that they cannot afford serious OSS development. When the flaws of the revolution become apparent, it is natural to move to the third world.

Completely wrong. OSS is about ending the idea of software development as an artificial monopoly business. It's not about "free lunch for everybody";

Wrong again. Unlike software licenses, OSS development is not an ongoing cost. You develop (or enhance) the software to meet your needs, release your changes back unto the community, and then forget about it. If those development costs are less than that of proprietary licenses, you are saving money.

There are plenty of valid pro-FLOS arguments, but this isn't one of them. Your 'if' should be at least all caps--licensing a proprietary solution is almost always cheaper (monetarily) than developing the same

There are plenty of valid pro-FLOS arguments, but this isn't one of them. Your 'if' should be at least all caps--licensing a proprietary solution is almost always cheaper (monetarily) than developing the same thing in-house, because in the proprietary case, the cost of development is spread across all the licensees.

However, in most cases, "in-house" OSS projects don't necessitate starting from scratch. So if enough of the work is already done, OSS is often still the way to go. There are a lot more IF's

Not only that, OpenOffice and other Open Source programs can be customized and modified at will -- by local programmers instead of by companies overseas

But one of the reasons MS is achieved so much success is because they made their stuff very easy to extend a long time ago, witness the gazillions of VB coders out there who use MS components in their apps, for example its a doddle to stick another button on to IE and code whatever you want behind it in C++ or VB taking advantage of almost all MS office functionality/disfunctionality depending on your point of view. Jesus the number of people I have seen working in major corps who depend on their self built spreadsheets to get anything done alone defies belief.

I always find this a very disingenuous argument for OSS as it implies MS software cannot be customized when it obviously can. Yes you dont have the source code but the occasions where the OS source is required are few and far between for application developers.

I always find this a very disingenuous argument for OSS as it implies MS software cannot be customized when it obviously can. Yes you dont have the source code but the occasions where the OS source is required are few and far between for application developers.

How much more customizeable can you get than having the source code? What I mean is, if you have the source, you can do *anything* concievable with it. Not just the things that Microsoft predicted you might want to change (even if that does happen to be 99% of it).

Say, what's the fastest way to rename 1,000 files according to some regular expression on your Windows box?

Most people don't need to do anything concievable with their computers... They need to do a small subset of those things that Microsoft predicted they might need to do.

And Microsoft gives them a happy, shiny, easy way to mess just with those things... Most VB coders would fall flat on their face if they had to mess with a large, poorly documented, open source application writen in C/C++/Java/whatever (add to that the fact that many OSS applications are written in esoteric (by VB standards) languages like P

And when you need to send the file to someone else on their computer, they need your modified code, along with the code that someone else hacked together to add something else for another file. And now this middle person has two patches which may be incompatiable.

Whereas, with the windows version, two people send one person two spreadsheets with VBA in it. It works - albiet probably has virii in it too, but oh well.

And when you need to send the file to someone else on their computer, they need your modified code, along with the code that someone else hacked together to add something else for another file. And now this middle person has two patches which may be incompatiable.

Right. That's why everybody submits their patches to the original author, who merges them, ensures they are compatible, and releases a new version that works for everybody.

when you are going to be forced to upgrade at some particular time that you have no control over?

How can a company afford to pay programmers to customize after paying monopolistic prices to get basic functionality?

What if some of the tools I want to use are not part of the MS collective, how will I get the MS parts to talk to the non-MS parts (I have actually taken an Excel file, dumped it into.csv in both Excel and Open Office? I don't know if my version of Excel has some kind of bug, but its output was

Basic programming jobs will leave the US. As applications get more complex there is less incentive to hire local programmers to do basic code work. I can hire foreigners to do the grunt work or use OSS toolkits/libraries to save money. I can then put that money into my core business which is marketing. Everyone that works at a software hous knows that marketing runs the show.

Th US has always exported jobs. I started in IT in 1989 as an IT Manager and have avoided the development and engineering jobs like the plauge because they where being outsourced. In 1994 I changed my focus from IT Managment to security because better network management tools had arrived an made it easier to outsource IT Management. Through the 90s I watched my IT friends getting laid off as the companies they worked for outsource management to IBM, Exodus, C&W,... In 2003 I took a promotion from Dir of Corp. Security to Dir of Production Operations and was laid off several months later after increasing uptime and everything else. Did I know that I would probably loose my job by taking the promotion? Yup! As a start-up on the decline I realised my director of sec. position was irrelevant so I angled for the Dir of Ops job which was very relevant to the company. I got the job and made improvements which benefited the company and I probably expended my employemt by over a year. Because I took the initiative to provide a service that my company needed I made out pretty well in the severance area.

It's up to me to make my self relevant to US employers and I have found that the easiest way is through being in management (though the politics are a bitch). You can't make an impact or change the world if you are locked in cube coding our trapped behind 15 miles of cable in a server room.

It's up to me to make my self relevant to US employers and I have found that the easiest way is through being in management...You can't make an impact or change the world if you are locked in cube coding our trapped behind 15 miles of cable in a server room.

Thank you, from the bottom of my cube-locked heart. If it weren't for folks like you, who would make all the outsourcing and layoff decisions?

Since, you brought it up. When I said the politics are a bitch I meant it. When I took that promotion I laid off several members of the team I took over. Why? They where under performing. I replace them with qualified people from my old department who would have been laid-off themselves. As Dir of security I oversaw the lay-offs of 400 people within the company. Only 3 where my decision. I fought to keep the people that where loyal to me and did their jobs well. Thats all any manager can do. I put my ass on

Basic programming jobs will leave the US. As applications get more complex there is less incentive to hire local programmers to do basic code work. I can hire foreigners to do the grunt work or use OSS toolkits/libraries to save money.

Huh? This doesn't make any sense. As applications get more complex you need programmers to do complex programming, not grunt work. I mean, there's nothing saying foreign workers can't do that, but complex applications certainly do not mean you need more grunt workers. If

I had a complex dev project with 50 US programmers. Keep 5 brightest US programmers as project coordinators managers. Hire 70 programmers in India to do the implementation and still save money.

Is it the right thing? I don't know it's just what I see going on. But I see US programming jobs moving towards R&D and Process Automation over the next 15 years. Will I be right...no idea. Take a look at what the big players are doing and saying and let me know what you think.They have systems building systems o

...because you had so many typos and misspellings that it made my head spin. I'm not the type to pick on mistakes like this, but I marveled at the quantity and type of errors in such a short message:

"Th US has always exported jobs. I started in IT in 1989 as an IT Manager and have avoided the development and engineering jobs like the plauge because they where being outsourced. In 1994 I changed my focus from IT Managment to security because better network management tools had arrived an made it easier to

I know the problems with so few management jobs available. What I am saying is that I believe that general day to day programming as we know is leaving the US and I believe that people in US who want to stay valuable need to focus on more on the complex spaces between specific technolgies than the technologies themselves. We all know how to make the parts the power comes from understanding the integration.

I agree. I am not OSFSF fanatatic But I believe the the real benefit of OSS is not that it's free but it allows you to freely integrate which is a definate bonus for governments and their tax payers.

I think that the Open Source movement is suited for goverment because the gov usually deals with undirected problems and since OSS is basically undirected in that you can make almost anything from the available parts its a good fit. Closed source apps are designed to solve specific directed problems usually wit

The question is whether upper-level management makes up at least, say, 10% of the heirarchy? If so, then everything's gonna be alright. The First World will be composed of the managers, "professionals", scientists, and intellectuals plus the people who need to be geographically close to serve them (hairdressers, etc.). The Second World will be composed of mid-level managers, knowledge-workers, etc. And the Third World will be those extracting the raw materials the global economy exists to transform.

Strictly from a security perspective I would have prefered that security was independant from OPs but the resporting structure was that both ops and security reported to the same VP and where in the same. This in my mind created a conflict of interest so when I saw the oppurtunity to take over both ops and keep the security responsiblity I did and my security engineers now managed our production environment. It was lay-off time and it was us or them. Easy choice for me. Security stays and we run ops as well

An awful lot of code is purely for in-house applications. This kind of stuff simply isn't threatened by open source, in fact I think it is helped.

Commoditise all the building blocks you want. Operating systems? Fine. Office applications? Yep - alright. Development tools? Yes please, we like that. When you're finished, you still left with a ton of tools that need plugging together to do useful work for a business.

Now, if your business just needs Office to write letters and send invoices, plus a database to track stock, then you were never in the kind of software market I'm talking about anyway. If, however, you happen to be a multi-national bank needing realtime market data information feeding to custom databases, with their own trading front ends etc. - this kind of stuff is only helped by Open Source. Give us the middleware (in this set-up, the OS and database is almost immaterial) and we'll carry on building the final product thank you. Always plenty of work for developers here.

for people who are passionate about it. For the "this looks like a good way to make a quick buck" brigade, I think the game is up...

Seriously, I've been through a couple of IT recessions, and it's never pretty. If you're good, care about your work and want to work hard, there are still plenty of opportunities. If you're into IT because it's well paid and involves no heavy lifting, you'll find it hard to get by untill the next boom (I've been through a couple of booms, as well). And in the confusion, lots of good people get laid off, and lots of clowns stay around - it's not fair, not clean and good people get screwed.

So, right now, IT is like most other jobs - if you're good, enjoy the work, and have people-skills, you'll probably be okay. If all you want is a fat paycheck in return for an MCSE, bad attitude and the ability to use TLAs without blushing, no, IT is pretty terrible right now...

My wifes family moved to from Jamacia to the US when she was 3. a few years ago we went to Jamacia and she was upset to see how poor the country was compaired to the US. The fact is as with most Caribbean nations more Jamaicans live outside Jamaica than live there. This is due to a lack of oppurtunity at home. If the people in these nations have more access to OSS or any technology it's a very good thing. They have more oppurtunity for education and we get more skilled immigrants.

The US is an immigrant nation and for the past few years population growth in the US is being fueled by immigration because fewer US citizens are having kids. It only makes sense to outsource our our needs to countries with high migration rates to the US. South America and Asia. That way we increase our skilled population base.

People like to attribute this to evil globalism or money grubbing multinationals but it's simple. If we don't have generations of skilled workers in this country it will cease to exist.This is not a bad thing for the US.

Yes. But in the future it won't be enough to merely understand how computers work in order to make it in the IT field. You will need to understand how an IT department fits within the overall structure of an organization and how to meet the requirements of your internal customers. You will also need to understand how to scale your IT services within the organization. There are entirely too many bad system administrators out there who really need to get either educated or purged, and even the current IT downswing hasn't been able to do it. There are still too many people who are in the IT job market who should simply stop sending their resumes around. 1999 is over, and you weren't that good.

If you can't think beyond "this machine is broken, here's how to fix it" to "this process is broken, here's how to fix it" then don't bother going into IT. There are already way too many people who are perfectly technically capable in IT but who have no idea of how to solve, or in some cases even identify, a larger problem.

Having recently been made redundant, I'm not sure that programming is a viable career option. One of the reasons for the redundancy was that the company is outsourcing development to India. OK, so the major reason was that we were the subject of a "merger" (takeover) and they wanted our customerbase. BTW "we" were the result of another merger which had occurred 18 months earlier.
I see the combined company eventually employing only business analysts, project co-ordinators, salesmen and client liason people.

I see the combined company eventually employing only business analysts, project co-ordinators, salesmen and client liason people.

With the exception of salesmen making in-person calls, I don't see any reason why these functions can't be outsourced as well.

The last frontier is, , , management.

While a CEO of a company who has outsourced all its core functions isn't going to render himself redundant on purpose, he has in effect, built an overseas organization capable of doing all the business the original or

Selling trinkets to cruise ships. If I had to sell trinkets to cruise ship passengers to feed my family I would. It has nothing to do with the price of an office suite. It means that there is no need for office suites. There is no oppurtunity to use one whether it is free or not.

These trinkets are usually hand made by familys to be sold. It's a family business designed to fit their markets and has to do with the "bandwitdth" of their ecomony andnot the price of an office suite.

The US economy has a ton a bandwidth to support many industries. Just because they don't doesn't mean it's bad for them.

Begin RantI'd much rather sell a "trinket" than stand on the corner begging for cash for food.

It's not like OSS doesn't have a need for trinkets. Look at ThinkGeek.com selling trinkets to geeks. Ooooh look at the shiny light on my new Mach 3 combination LED flashlight, key chain, bottle opener, tire repair kit. Or my desktop refrigerator that holds a 6 pack of Geek Drink of Choice, or caffinated soap. What the fuck is caffinated soap for? Maybe it's for removing the blue thinking goo from my ass when I sat on it in my new ergonomic Quake Battle Chair.

I like the idea of economic bandwidth too. One of the biggest problems with the IT industry in the UK and facing tecchie grads right now is coming to terms with the fact that the economy just doesn't have the economic bandwidth to gainfully employ them.

There is still a staggering number of incompetents employed in IT in the UK that the last recession didn't purge. They are the people who will buy trinkets. Hehe.

Investment and reinvestment. Those two words are the root cause of the decline and the ultimate collapse of the IT industry. Read the article. Then read other articles about US companies outsourcing development to foreign countries and off-shore locations. In every one of them, the word investment is frequently used. In this case, it is the Carribean countries who may be able to invest the savings realized from moving off MS Office to OpenOffice.org in development of an IT infratructure and education.

to save a few bucks now, US companies are virtually guaranteeing that in a few years time, there will be limited to no opportunity for US citizens in the IT industry.

Not only IT. Almost all R&D is exportable. Check the bioinformatics and drug chemistry mailing lists. How many American names can you find there? If I'm a chemical company, I'd love to have my R&D in a country where the folks can just chuck stuff down the drain when they're done with the experiment. And as for mechanical design -

I agree, but programming would only be worth doing in the long run if you actually enjoyed doing it. After society's fascination with day-to-day software like Office wears off as the century progresses, programming may simply be viewed as nothing more than a service field to keep essential computers running, for computers would be inevitably integrated into all facets of life.

One would think that economists, having studied the Japanese downfall would have warned against rapid and unchecked growth but no, they had to wait until the virtual walls started to fall apart on them.

Excuse me? Not only economists, every taxi driver could predict the.com crash, and have done so quite vocally. It was hardly a surprise for anyone. That just didn't stop it from happening, because preventing an economical crisis is not something investors and entrepreneurs (can afford to) care about indivi

Off topic but inspired:Common OS to User Compatitbility ChartMacOS is the equivalent of the trophy wife looks good fairly stable but but expensive. Doesn't like to do things her dad (Steve) didn't intend.

Windows is the equivalent of the reformed catholic school girl. Looks pretty good. Okay on the pocketbook. And if you press the right buttons you can get it to do something nasty. (I think this is smething unconcious on Bills part)

OSS is a golem. Doesn't look very good but it's basically unstopable. Like

An H1-B is a type of visa that allows non-citizens to be brought in to work certain jobs when there is a lack of qualified individuals in the local employee pool. The system tends to unfortunately be abused by manager$ who know they can pay them less, and demand more of them than they could of a US citizen employee.

3) The improved stability of Win2K and WinXP really has reduced the need for IT helpdesk staffing at many companies. Hard as it may be for the Slashdot crowd to believe, that's true. So if asking the Dilbert in building 19 "Have you tried rebooting?" was your job, well, probably not anymore.

Never underestimate the ability of computer users to ignore the obvious. Having worked in technical support, I heard from plenty of people who have had problems with win2k/XP; verything ranging from "how do I get m